Other parts of the public sector — perhaps even the NHS, Britain’s largest employer — will be considered next year.

Many will regard this as good news. Police and firefighters have put their lives on the line battling terrorists and the Grenfell tower fire. Few would deny that NHS workers and teachers ought to earn more money. The prisons are horribly understaffed. And Britain has been worn down by 10 years of austerity economics.

Few will admit it, but the public/private divide is one of the main causes of inequality in Britain. The reason: public sector workers tend to have generous “defined benefit” or “final salary” pension schemes. In the private sector, those things have been phased out, following a change in the law back in 1986. Even though some public sector workers may be paid less right now, they’re paid thousandsmore when they retire — money that private sector workers will never see. (And, to rub it in, those public pensions are generated with tax money paid by private sector workers.) Once you take into account pension wealth, public sector workers on average earn more than people in the private sector.

Public sector workers have had their pay rises limited to 1% per year since 2013, following the 2008 financial crisis. After inflation, that has cut the real value of their wages. The TUC published some data on that, noting, for instance, that some government professionals have lost £4,000 or more from the buying value of their salaries. That certainly sounds as if public sector workers have made real sacrifices.

Whether or not £506 per week counts as “overpaid” is a matter of debate. But Chancellor Philip Hammond was right when he said in July that public sector workers are paid more than everyone else, on average.

This isn’t just a slight divergence around the mean. This is a major contributor to inequality in Britain today. Public sector workers, a minority of all British workers, are better paid on a weekly basis and twice as wealthy upon retirement than the rest of us, even after a decade of austerity. Public sector workers are only about one quarter or one fifth of all UK workers. Yet taxes in the UK benefit them much more generously than the private sector workers who pay them.

So, while it is great that public sector pay will rise, that is not a solution to a much more important issue for UK workers: The lack of retirement provision in the private sector, and the fact that poorer private sector workers are expected to pay — through their taxes — for the pensions of richer public workers.